Do your customers prefer to talk to a bot or a customer service department?

Interacting with bots or people, that's the question. With the digital transformation, many companies are betting on this technology.

Do your customers prefer to talk to a bot or a customer service department?

To truly understand the potential of bots, we first need to understand what they really are, what they can bring to our company, what makes them different from interacting with a person.

A bot is a computer program that attempts to understand a person's needs through natural language. A bot is capable of carrying out specific tasks and mimicking human behavior.

Types of bots:

With new technologies, we can find different types of bots, and the context used to talk about them can vary greatly. But we classify them into two groups,”Good bots“and”Bad bots”. Although bots were created to facilitate human tasks, there are also those who have created them with malicious intentions.

Good bots

• Chatbots:

In short, a chatbot is a bot that is designed to carry out Conversations with people. They tend to have a personality similar to a human being, offering information or answering questions. It's a great opportunity for your company if used and implemented correctly.

• Crawlers:

These are usually bots that search for data from other APIs or websites.

• Transactional bots:

They search for and transmit content to the user based on their interests. They act as intermediaries in transactions between people and external media.

• Information bots:

Bots in this category provide useful information, often as push notifications from information channels.

• Entertainment bots (gaming bots... ):

They usually work as characters for us to play against, or we can even practice and develop skills in video games.

Bad bots

• Hackers:

These bots are created to distribute malware, trick people, and attack websites.

• Spammers:

Spam bots are usually designed to publish promotional content in bulk to drive traffic to the spammer's website.

• Scrapers:

Scraper bots are designed to steal content (email addresses, etc.).

In Novicell we like to classify them between”RULED-BASED bots“and”AI bots”.

Bots have existed for a few years, but it has not been until now that they have become more important. Do you remember the bots in the Hispanic IRC chat or the Clippy assistant in office 2000?

But if we have to mention one type of bot that has gained greater strength, this has been the Chatbot or virtual assistant.

For example, Ikea used “Anna” as a virtual assistant that answered all your questions. Currently we can also find big brands such as Apple and Microsoft that also have virtual voice assistants such as “Siri” and “Cortana”.

We can see how large companies are starting to use new technologies like virtual assistants. But do people really want to talk to a company's bots?

People VS Bots

As you can see, there's no middle ground, people hate or like to chat with chatbots. It's a “love-hate” relationship.

Muchas companies use bots in their customer services, although they must be very careful because if it is not well worked and implemented, the user may be dissatisfied. The experience can be very negative.

On some occasions we have been able to see how users want to ask the company a question and the chatbots have not been able to answer.

One thing we do know is that one of the key components of a company's customer service is that it must be able to communicate in the same language as the customer.

In Spain, there is still a long way to go with chatbots, this technology has to be improved, it must be polished.

Talking to a machine still throws a lot of people back, but every day that passes we will see it more normal. Whether we like it more or less, we'll have to get used to it because it seems that this new form of interaction is here to stay.

What are the benefits of using chatbots or virtual assistants in your company's customer service department?

• Get in touch with users
• Personalized customer support
• They respond immediately
• Saving time for the user
• Reducing costs to the company

Los Business chatbots have a lot of advantages, although knowing their disadvantages can help us to perfect them. What is clear is that they are here to stay.

How can we help you?

If you need more information, do not hesitate to contact contact us.